Job Candidates

Expected Completion Date: 
May 2021

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Major Fields:
Macroeconomics, Economic Methodology, Economic History, History of Economic Thought, Monetary Economics

Dissertation Title:
The Rise of Neo-Fascism in the 21st Century

Dissertation Abstract:
My dissertation research blends political economy with fascist studies to tell the history of neo-fascism into the 21st century when it saw a significant resurgence. The first chapter tells the history of neo-fascism in the context of the global macroeconomy and the study of historical fascism. The second chapter samples nine neo-fascists to define their ideology, allowing for all the weird nuances of fascist thought. The final chapter tells a financial history of thirteen alt-right nonprofits in the United States with attention to their common fates during the Great Recession and the rise of the alt-right's media prominence.

Contact Email:
isaam829@newschool.edu

Expected Completion Date:
May 2021

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Major Fields:
Economic Development, Political Economy of Agrarian Change, Post-colonial Capital, Informal Economy, Economics of Caste and Gender

Dissertation Title:
Agrarian Question of India: Past, Present, Future

Profile: 
My dissertation examines the role of agriculture in the Indian experience of post-colonial capitalist development through the lens of the Agrarian Question. Drawing on Byres (1986) and Sanyal (2014), I argue that resolutions of the classic Agrarian Question, identified with the transformation in agricultural productive forces and relations which enable capitalist industrial development, are essentially processes of Primitive Accumulation. In this light I critically examine the nature and impact of the Green Revolution in India as a potential resolution to the Agrarian Question.

Based on this theoretical-historical understanding, I examine contemporary agrarian class relations and practices of diversification in post-Green Revolution northern India through empirical and ethnographic field-based data. I argue that despite uniform adoption of Green Revolution methods and investment in labor-saving techniques, agricultural producers are better described as petty commodity producers than as capitalist farmers because production is motivated by the logic of household reproduction and is reliant on the use of unpaid family labor. Further, I argue that while most agricultural households are diversified into non-agricultural economic activities and in particular into wage employment, landowning upper-caste households are able to diversify into formal salaried employment, whereas landless lower-caste households are confined to precarious daily-wage work. This segmentation along lines of caste, landownership, and type of employment, is characterized as Shah & Lerche’s (2018) ’conjugated oppression.’

After completing my dissertation in Spring 2021, I plan to use my fieldwork data for an analysis of the reliance of agricultural profits in Bas Dudha on unpaid gendered family labor and underpaid migrant labor. I also intend to work on a comparative analysis of theorizations of contemporary petty commodity production by Harriss-White and Sanyal.

Contact Email:
yadas719@newschool.edu